Huai-nan Tzu

Philosophical Synthesis in Early Han Thought

Charles Le Blanc

Publication Year: 1985

The present study emphasizes Chapter Six of Huai-nan Tzu in expounding the theory of kan-ying STIMULUS-RESPONSE; RESONANCE, which postulates that all things in the universe are interrelated and influence each other according to pre-set patterns.

Cover

Front matter

Acknowledgements

The first is Derk Bodde, Professor Emeritus at the University of
Pennsylvania. He read with his habitual acuity the drafts of the
Ph.D. thesis from which this book derives and offered many helpful
comments, both on form and contents, which have been incorporated
therein. My debt to him goes well beyond the strict limits of Huainan
Tzu studies...

Contents

Foreword

At first sight the saying seems an impressive expression
of universality. On further thought, however, one realizes that
the term t'ien-hsia, 'all-under-Heaven', was less than truly
universalistic when it was used two thousand years ago. First
of all, its connotations at that time were overwhelmingly
human. T'ien-hsia then meant, for most Chinese, primarily...

Introduction

When Liu An 劉安, King of Huai-nan 准南(179?-122 BC), paid
his state visit to Emperor Wu 武 (r. 141-87 BC), he presented
him, as a token of esteem, with a book in twenty-one chapters
that had ‘just recently been completed'.1 The Emperor
treasured the work and had it placed in his private library. As...

Part One. Historical and Textual Studies

Chapter 1. Liu An and the Authorship of Huai-nan Tzu

A full biography of Liu An would deserve an independent
study of major proportions. Generally speaking, Han sources
describe three aspects of Liu An's life and personality: firstly ,
the thinker, writer, and patron of learning; secondly, the
political leader, who allegedly attempted rebellion again...

Chapter 2. The Transmission of Huai-nan Tzu

While admitting that a work called Huai-nan Tzu was
effectively written by Liu An and his scholar-retainers in the
mid-second century BC, do we have reasonable grounds to
believe that it was transmitted faithfully over a period of
more than two thousand years? Were there any significant...

Chapter 3. Han Commentaries on Huai-nan Tzu

In his Preface to Huai-nan Tzu, 2a, Kao informs us that
‘ the text was collated and established' (chiao-ting chuan chü
枝走撰具) by Liu Hsiang. The latter's son, Liu Hsin,
presumably transmitted this first critical edition to his
follower, Chia K'uei...

Chapter 4. The Sources of Huai-nan Tzu

A close study of the composition of Huai-nan Tzu reveals
massive borrowing from earlier sources. Approximately onethird
of the text derives directly from more than twenty
pre-Han works belonging to a wide variety of philosophical
schools and literary genres....

Part Two. Translation and Interpretation

Chapter V. Translation of Huai-nan Tzu 6 and Commentary

The numbers in the margin of the translation correspond
to the page and column of the Liu Wen-tien edition. The
Chinese text of Huai-nan Tzu 6, with critical emendations, is
appended at the end of the present study (pp. 211-5)....

Chapter VI. The Idea of Kan-Ying in Huai-nan Tzu

At first reading, it would seem that Chapter Six exhibits,
in miniature, the confusion and lack of unity scholars such as
Hou Wai-lu 侯外廣 found in Huai-nan Tzu as a whole. One
cannot help being struck by the lexical, syntactic and stylistic
difficulty of the text. The connection of successive literary
units appears obscure, if not non-existent. It is perhaps no...

Conclusion

The cosmological texts we have examined intend to describe
how (descriptive cosmology) the world is rather than why
(explicative cosmology) it is so. According to the Huai-nan Tzu
Weltanschauung, the world as we perceive it is the
spontaneous outcome of a natural process. Naturalness
(tzu-jan) is all at once inherent in the objective cosmological...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.